WrestlingIQ
Software for wrestling teams
Going full time on WrestlingIQ was something I had wanted to do for all of 2021, but wasn't able to pull it off until Jan 1, 2022. Lots of factors there, but I am happy to say I am (finally!) full time on the business.
Customer wise I'm at about 30 paying customers, need to get to 70-100 by the end of 2022 to keep my full time focus on it.
Twelve months ago I started focusing on club wrestling teams, in addition to high school & college. I invoiced my fifth club team today, bringing my total customer count to 5 and MRR up to $200. This was much needed validation, as one of these customers came to me blind from Google and not from my existing network (the other 4 did).
Not all roses though. In the sports world sales cycles are cyclical - all five of these teams wanted to launch registration within a week of each other which means I've been crushed work wise and feeling tired. Because of my initial pricing, I essentially offered fairly custom websites for each of these teams which contributed extra. All this to say that my initial instinct of not building a lot of UI for these features was good - it allowed me to get these customers by offering features without fully building them. But now that it is more validated, I absolutely need to go backfill them so the service can become at least 80% self service to get a team up and running. Looking forward to building that out so I can focus a lot more on selling!
This was a long road to get to a paying customer. The first paid customer (not a beta one) was a club team. In many ways club teams are the classic easy sell in this particular niche. Clubs are businesses that have the power to spend money to help them make money or smooth operations. I think high school teams and club teams will be the biggest users of WrestlingIQ.
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Congrats!
Curiuos how you acquired this customer.
Did they find you online or did you pitch to this particular club in person?
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In this case I took out an ad and posted to an old school message board from the state I grew up in. These message boards tend to be hubs where coaches in the wrestling community hang out.
The post linked to this offer: https://blog.wrestlingiq.com/introducing-software-for-club-wrestling-teams/ which one team in the area took me up on.
So I suppose the final answer in this case was two things.One, posting an offer to where coaches hang out. Two, having a personal network in that specific niche (aka although I did not know the coach, the coach knew me). The second part was key in this first customer as the club feature functionality did not have a lot of competitive differentiation at that point.
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Love this. Seems like a healthy way to go about acquiring real customers. Good luck!
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I signed up my first club team to use WrestlingIQ for payments and parent/wrestler registration. I'm going to attempt to build out 25 founding club teams in an attempt to build up the business. I've decided to focus a lot on club teams for several reasons. First, they are real businesses, willing to spend money. Two, they have full control over their decisions (no athletic department).
https://blog.wrestlingiq.com/introducing-software-for-club-wrestling-teams/
After a first, generally successful season, I'm struggling to differentiate WrestlingIQ from other products on the market. Coming out of this, my hypothesis is that the wrestling community is supportive of tech coming from within and prefer this over big companies. This will be my strategy (personal relationships, playing up my ties to the sport) to get the first wave of paying customers.
For the first season at WrestlingIQ I managed to snag two customers to use it in beta form. Stanford University and Skyline High School in my home state of Washington.
2 Comments
So cool. I'm a former wrestler from PA.
Congrats Matt. Going full-time is really liberating but it has its challenges, it can feel lonely and demotivating sometimes... I run a community for indie makers where we are all going trough the same, it might be beneficial for you to take a look into it. It's called: WBE Space
cheers and good luck